1. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates to vehicles and, more particularly, to novel systems and methods for suspensions excelling at high speed travel and low speed obstacle climbing.
2. The Background Art
Military operations and missions often involve geographic areas lacking the infrastructure enjoyed in the civilian world. For example, high speed travel on smooth roads may be common in civilian travel. Of course, military operations use civilian roads when possible. However, for a variety of reasons, modern warfare is often carried out in areas lacking the infrastructure for moving conventional troops in conventional vehicles.
Military operations must balance fire power, mobility, and protection. These criteria largely control the design of combat vehicles. A specific mission, whether artillery, infantry, armor, reconnaissance, or the like, will have a particular objective. Accordingly, such missions require vehicle configurations providing the fire power, mobility, and protection to accomplish their objectives.
As may be appreciated, mobility is itself a protection. The ability to arrive quickly, move rapidly, and withdraw speedily, provide a degree of protection from any response requiring significant time to mount. Certain combat vehicles have been designed to provide such mobility. However, a desired mobility in one environment has not translated into equal mobility in a different environment. Likewise, transport of sufficient fire power requires a vehicle designed to support the guns, rockets, mounting hardware, observation systems, personnel, and the like required to man the weapon systems.
Modern lightweight infantry and reconnaissance missions, basic missions that have existed for centuries, now operate over larger distances. Personnel and equipment must be projected across these larger distances. Additionally, massing armies requires significant time, materiel, money, personnel, and resources that perhaps do not exist. Moreover, such resources, if they do exist, are difficult to project into the theater. Finally, even if such resources were projected into the theater, they would likely be ineffective, as the resistance may evaporate faster than the mobilization speeds of such forces.
What is needed is a combat vehicle having the ability to deliver significant quantities of fire power, protection, and mobility over a wide range of environments. To be successful, the vehicle may be adapted to operate at the speeds of regular commercial vehicles on highways where available, travel cross country at high speed where the obstacles are comparatively few and somewhat predictable, and yet be able to crawl over rocks and terrain having no transportation infrastructure. Such a vehicle may not allow terrain to dictate the battle. Such a vehicle does not currently exist in commercial or military inventories.